


Wrong

by Jacque_le_Prince



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Body Dysphoria, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Insecurity, Metaphors, Race, being black and accepting being black, my life as of late, racial insecurity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-06
Updated: 2018-01-06
Packaged: 2019-03-01 06:28:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13288971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jacque_le_Prince/pseuds/Jacque_le_Prince
Summary: This is probably one of the most pretentious-sounding things I’ve ever written, but it’s worth trying to express my conflicted feelings.





	Wrong

Would you believe me if I told you that my appearance has been praised ever since I was born?

Would you believe me if I told you that the nurses in the hospital coddled me and cooed at my resting face instead of taking me to the nursery right away?

I certainly didn’t believe my mother when she told me that. Nor my father when he said a stranger in the elevator admired my Beauty the night I was taken home.

I was always Beautiful from the moment I could breathe. And just like Tinker Bell, it was true because everyone believed it. Everyone told me I was Beautiful, so I believed that it was  **_right_ ** .

But back then, I didn’t have a proper understanding of the person within my reflection.

For so many years, I saw a cute girl with the slightest tinge of melanin dusting the far reaches of her skin, but that was just the cocoon incubating my sixteen-year metamorphosis. However, it wasn’t always perfectly concealed.

Sometimes the caterpillar inside would jolt within its confines, shaking the thin branch from which the cocoon hung from. It was just barely enough to show that there was something more beneath the shell.

What emerged in its maturation was an African-American androgyne. The colors red, black, and green painted one wing while pink, blue, and purple painted the other.

But no one could see the wings I so happily flew with. They were transparent to everyone, and their colors warped into whatever image a person’s mind illustrated. Sometimes people would see words that told a story colors could not.

“Latina?” “Half white?” “Indian?”

Countless speculations decorated that wing while that other only had one constant assumption: “Cis.”

Within my body, I carried the heart of both a male and a female. It was not two halves divided by a thin veil, but rather a mixture, a concoction. The red spirit of a woman merged with the blue spirit of a man, creating an entirely new purple spirit within my heart.

Yet, despite discovering the black nonbinary I truly was, I still looked like my caterpillar state. And the cocoon that showed the fair-skinned girl was still being awed by others.

To them, I was still Beautiful, but this Beauty was not the beauty I seeked.

No, as I grew into the woman’s body that God, himself, had given me, that Beauty had twisted itself into something  **_wrong_ ** .

When people admired me now, what they admire is their own fetishized fantasy.

“Yellow bone”, “Red bone”, the perfect combination of a European woman’s face with an African woman’s curves.

Skin as dull as sand, and lips as thin as paper.

A nose as petite as a mouse's, and hair that submits to gravity.

Yes, I'm a doll, a perfect figurine for the world to hold in their grimy hands.

I'm Beautiful, Beautiful to everyone...but me.

I’m black androgyne, so why did God make me look this way?

Why are my voice and body missing the masculinity it’s meant to have?

Why are my features missing the bass and melanin they’re supposed to have?

I'm the one living in this body, so don't I deserve to look like...me?


End file.
